Matchpoint: Tennis Championships Review
Australia’s Nick Kyrgios is the top spun maverick of the tennis world, a controversy-courting Happy Gilmore-like figure who doesn’t so much as march to the beat of his own drum as strap on a pair of bright-red basketball sneakers and shamelessly stomp all over Wimbledon’s stuffy, all-white traditions. His prominent placement on the cover of Matchpoint: Tennis Championships sets the expectation that developer Torus Games’ debut tennis simulation is poised to finally shake things up for the stagnating tennis genre… but sadly, that hasn’t proven to be the case. A smooth yet imbalanced style of play, uninspiring career mode, and surprisingly limited multiplayer support means the only trait that Matchpoint shares with its provocative cover star is an overriding sense of squandered potential.
To its credit, Matchpoint’s uncluttered control setup makes it supremely easy to pick up. Your player’s movement is heavily assisted so that you only need to nudge the thumbstick in the general direction of a returned ball and they’ll be automatically guided to the ideal position in order to meet it. This allows you to keep your focus squarely on your opponent’s side of the court, where you can steer around a dinner plate-sized reticle and pull off a standard array of tennis shots with a level of pinpoint accuracy that goes beyond Djokavic to border on Jedi levels of precision.
It’s a rally system that’s certainly reliable and offers you plenty of freedom, but it’s also one that’s a bit too easy to master since it’s all reward and very little risk. The window for timing your shots is exceedingly generous, and you’re not really penalized in any way for overcooking a shot or serve. There are probably computerized ball machines that have
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